


A Song of Crows

by Bladespeaker



Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, Original Characters (GW2), Sylvari, deadeye - Freeform, don't mess with Verdis's wife, short fiction, tw: gore, tw: torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24893413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bladespeaker/pseuds/Bladespeaker
Summary: Verdis Noct is a man of many depths, but even Illa Frost fails to realize where his past has taken him.  What will she learn when her life is endangered?
Relationships: Frostfire (Illa Frost/Verdis Noct)
Kudos: 1





	A Song of Crows

Illa knew much about Verdis. She better than anyone knew how to read the subtle changes in his tone or vocal cadence that signaled when to move during a hunt, to read the shifts in his stance and movement that to casual observers would be nothing out of the ordinary. She alone knew how how his eyes crinkled with that warm emotion he let only her see. To those who didn’t know him, Verdis Noct was an airhead, an empty-skulled idiot, and a flirt extraordinaire -- perfect, they both agreed, for playing the part of prey.

Those who took long enough to actually know him would find a shocking wit behind the mask, a calculating mind that played behind the part of the fool and relished the thrill of the game. He had played it with her in the past with both knowing each others’ secrets; their renewed teamwork and roles in recent times had worked to the dismay of dozens of bounties collected or killed. Verdis, out of personal preference, did not often play the role of the hunter, and Illa had respected his wishes to avoid it whenever possible.

She was soon to learn a new secret from him. She already knew that Verdis had a beautiful voice. It was warm and rolling, smooth and inviting, beautiful enough with his sea-raised lilt to make wanderers pause and listen, and encouraging them to take a load off both their feet and wallets. She had learned in the past that he would sing for two reasons: publicly, to the applause of the crowd, and privately, for her ears alone, when his voice wove a melody that sang in both her mind and her blood. Never before would she have suspected a third stage for his song. On this stage, forced to take the stark spotlight yet hidden from view, Verdis’s warm voice became something entirely else.

She discovered his secret in the Maguuman jungles shortly after the Pact’s failed attack against the Elder Dragon. She had made a mis-step. In her career, it was rare, but fatal, and in the wake of recent events, even more so. Many of her sylvan kin had fallen prey to the Jungle Dragon’s all-commanding voice. Even she was not deaf to it. 

She had encountered and made the mistake of believing a small camp of Pact members, crouched and murmuring nervously among themselves, to be allies. Her edge was dulled in the wake of the Dragon’s newfound horror, and to add further to her disorientation, her drakehound, Jags, had been poisoned by a violent tribe of local hylek. The buzzing in her head made it hard to hear what they were saying as she carefully approached, palms-up; with the chaos around her, she couldn’t focus on reading their lips. When she stepped into the clearing and asked for aid, she was quickly attacked and restrained despite her confused protests.

She didn’t recall much after that; the blow to her head and the pounding of the Dragon’s voice and heart in her ears left her dizzy and weak. She only caught snippets in the haze that obscured her awareness -- something about burning all sylvari, how the Commander herself couldn’t be trusted, and that she was leading her guildmates deeper into the jungle to where she and the Marshal would surely turn and kill them all, if they hadn’t already. Someone had taken her dog and claimed him too useful an asset to let fall prey to one of the Dragon’s minions -- as if she wasn’t his mistress, as if the hound didn’t protest and whine and snap to get back to her. They blamed her for poisoning him, as if she hadn’t slaughtered the frogman who had dared commit the deed.

“Better now to kill all those traitors instead of giving them another chance to stab us in the back,” one hissed, glowering over his shoulder to where she stumbled uncertainly through the thick foliage. His eyes were wild with hatred and fear, yet the cold tone in his voice twisted a knot of unease in Illa’s stomach more than anything he could have shown.

They shoved her to her knees. One lamented that the spikes on her cheeks made it impossible to strike her as much as he would have liked. She swallowed and distantly remembered how Verdis had proudly claimed that it took a special person to love and be loved by the thorns of the rose, how she had for once felt something beautiful about her spiny visage at his words. Then there was blood and pain and stars in her eyes as the gauntleted fist of a norn warrior crushed into the delicate woody vines of her jaw and demanded to know where his allies had been taken.

They did not know she was not their enemy. In their hatred and grief and fear, they had made her one for them. She swallowed thickly and tried to answer that she did not know of what he asked, but it couldn’t get past the golden sap that swelled in her cheek, bruising already at the merciless strike. Then she paused in her slurred murmurs; the norn shouted at her again, once, before his brow furrowed with the same confusion that had settled on her face. His demands withered.

There, in that hellish jungle, was the sound of a siren. Yet he sang not of beauty or grace, or of love and joy. Illa listened carefully and recognized it for a sailors’-song, a war-cry put to music, chilling and filled with vengeance as it slid, venomous and slow, into the ears of its first victim.

_“Hark, ho, the carrion crow --  
Stop still a moment and tell me where you go?   
Whence do you dine, from where do you come?  
What savory feats color your beak?   
Where do you dine?  
Where is your seat?”_

The guard that looked up shook his head once, confusion clearing from his features as rage took its place. “Spread out -- someone’s making a fool of --!”

An echoing, thunderous crack; a resounding boom; a hot, crimson spray in the humid air. The norn reeled back, shocked as his companions as he fell heavily to the ground. Still the song continued. 

_“I dine not on mead, I dine not at seat  
Fit for king, or peasant, or lord --   
Mine is the sky, and none afford   
To miss the feast, for I go to dine  
On all that are poor, on all that are fine --”_

“Somebody find him! We’ve got a sniper!” 

Illa felt the trickle from her jaw slow as her blood froze. Now, now she knew the voice. That lilt, that curl that so lovingly once sang around words sung in happier times, became a drone, a buzz, a spell and a promise filled with a dull, burning hatred. There was a pause; Verdis hummed the dark song quietly, moving invisible above them. A human screamed more orders, frazzled blond hair whipping in the hot air as he set up a shot and lobbed one of their few firebombs into the canopy above. Birds burst from the air, screaming in protest as their home was lit in a blinding sun of orange flame. In the heat-wave that flared back towards the paranoid gathering, Illa felt the blood on her face dry and crack.

Ten seconds passed. A minute. A laugh, dry and grim, from the guards around her, as some chuckled darkly that that should silence their bird.

There were three rapid shots as two stepped towards her again; the one who spoke watched in horror as two deadly bullets lodged firmly in the left -- a brawnier man -- and the third silenced one of the mocking asura. The one guard left standing rushed towards Illa and roughly pulled her in front of her, covering her body with that of the broken ranger. 

“Come out!” she barked. Illa felt an icy edge bite roughly into her neck. “Come out or I carve this rotten cabbage’s head from its shoulders!”

The music paused.

“Oh, _mia cara,_ ” Verdis murmured from somewhere in the shadows, and had the words been spoken in private, Illa would have felt her blood warm, “do you think I need to have more reason to end this? I instead will give you an ultimatum.”

Illa hissed in pain despite herself; her blood wept a thin line at the blade’s edge. “I wasn’t kidding,” came the human’s growl. “You have two seconds.”

There was a soft click. “In that case, you have one.”

She felt warm blood from where the human had scratched her face on hers oozing down and mingling with her own. She opened her mouth; Illa heard her take a breath to shout back a warning or threat or promise, felt the pressure on her neck increase -- 

And then thunder echoed in her ears and a fine mist rained over her. The human’s supporting, deadly weight reeled back, and with it fell the ranger. Yet before she could hit the ground, there was a shadow, a mark on the ground, and she fell heavily into the arms of the man who sang as Death that bloody night.

“You didn’t tell me you sang like that.”

They had found refuge with a friendly hylek camp whose interactions with the Commander had given them just enough reason to trust at least a few of her kind. Illa’s voice was hoarse, and she didn’t like how much her body was shaking in the embers of the flame that burned between them. 

Verdis made no reply. He set his rifle across his crossed legs and took a cloth from his pack to polish it. The weapon was elegant, deadly, eye-catching, and formed of some black, iridescent metal that shone like oil-slick in the fire-light. Illa wondered how long he had kept it, or his knowledge of sharpshooting, from her.

She had decided to let the remark remain unanswered when she finally heard him, low and almost-unheard:

“I don’t.”

There was a discomfort to his voice. Even now she still felt his rage in the air, taut as any bowstring, indignant at how they were treated just because of their race, furious at how they had nearly killed her out of their own fear. Yet behind it was a shame that throbbed with a dull pain. She raised her head to look up at him. He did not meet her eyes as he squinted down the empty rifle’s sights and carefully aligned them with a pair of fine pliers. 

“A few milimeters off,” she heard him mutter. “Can’t afford that.”

“Verdis...”

“I am not a killer, Illa,” he said, soft and resolute, as if to convince himself. “I’ve always told myself I disliked killers, those who relish in pain as the Smiling Death, that I could never be like her or anyone else that is that kind of monster.” He turned and placed the bullets he had into his satchel along with the ammunition he had scavenged from the rogue dead. She saw his hands shake once as if with the phantom pains that still plagued the deep sinews of his once-ravaged arm. “But when they had you... I became someone I had buried deep in my past. A pirate who had the ability to hurt, to make others suffer -- who _enjoyed_ it.”

She swallowed. “Did you nearly turn to Nightmare then?”

His silence spoke more than he could have said. There was only the soft clinking of metal on metal as the thief -- the _deadeye_ \-- continued to place his ammunition in his bag.

She braced herself and stumbled over to him, where she lowered herself to his side and raised a hand to his arm. “You are not who you were, my love,” she said quietly. 

He flinched at the touch as if burned, but did not move from it. “I nearly was. I heard...” He ran his tongue over his beautiful lips and took a shuddering breath. His throat bobbed. “I heard _It_ when I saw what they had done to you. It told me where to go, how to pick them off, how to make them suffer like rabbits before a snake.”

Neither of them needed explanation as to what It was. The Dragon’s voice buzzed like a dull roar in Illa’s own throbbing head as much as it must have roared in his. She was silent, staring unblinkingly at him. The man who smiled gave a laugh that cracked unsteadily in the middle and ran trembling fingers over her hand, careful for the thorns that crawled up her knuckles.

“Oh, my love,” he sighed, and slowly rested his head on her shoulder. “Will we make it out alive?”

“We will, Verdis,” she whispered. She half-turned her head to press a chaste kiss to his arm. “We must.”

In the tent across from them where the feverish drakehound was under the hylek alchemist’s monitoring, a novice stepped out and told them that they could stay the night; their only payment would be in the blood of the Mordrem or other threats that surely would come their way at nightfall; a more than fair price to pay, the sylvari agreed, for the miracles they were working on Illa’s dog. They thanked him again and watched him leave in silence. Illa carefully rested her bandaged form against her husband’s and stared up at his silent visage.

“Verdis,” she whispered. His ear twitched. “Sing me a song, my love. Sing of happier times.”

For a moment she thought he would refuse. His back straightened and his jaw shifted, brow furrowing as he stared unblinking into the embers in front of them. Then, softly, slowly, lowly, like a lullaby wrapping its comforting arms around her, Verdis began to sing.


End file.
